With a week to go before its first-season finale — Hannibal started late, in midseason — this cat-and-mouse tale of a damaged FBI detective and a seemingly endless parade of deranged, neurotic and seriously disturbed psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and just plain weirdoes has been really good of late.

Hugh Dancy, left, with Ellen Muth

Moody and introspective where The Following was loud and deliberately over-the-top — to the point of being ludicrous — Hannibal is a TV oddity. As prime-time dramas go, it looks, sounds and feels as if it belongs on a cable channel, not a mainstream broadcast network where crime dramas more often tend to look and sound like cookie-cutter variations on the same old franchise idea: CSI meets NCIS in a Law & Order: SVU world.

Hannibal is different. It’s simple, yet clever. Moody, but not moribund. Thursday’s episode finds defective detective Will Graham, well-played by Hugh Dancy, doubting himself yet again, as he realizes a copycat killer he thought he had seen die years earlier is still alive.

The I’m-not-dead-yet serial killer is an old trope in TV crime drama, but Hannibal still manages to surprise, often in inventive and unexpected ways. The series hails from Bryan Fuller, a TV auteur and the creator of such whimsical, creatively inspired series as Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, and almost everything about Hannibal has a hypnotic quality, from the visceral performances by Dancy and Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter, to the moody dream sequences that provide a peek inside the disturbed mind.

Mads Mikkelsen

As a TV drama, Hannibal is eerie and unsettling, yet oddly compelling. Graham tracks down killers by getting inside their heads and trying to think as they do. If he knows how they think, he reasons, he can predict where they’ll be next and get there ahead of them, and stop them in the act. He pays a terrible price, though, each time he crosses over to the dark side. Graham is dedicated to the job, but mentally fragile. That’s a tricky combination for an actor to pull off, but Dancy makes it look, if not easy exactly, at least believable.

Thursday’s episode and next week’s finale also features the return of Gillian Anderson, in a recurring role as Dr. Lecter’s psychoanalyst and therapist, Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier.

Gillian Anderson

So far, Dr. D. hasn’t proven to be as weird and neurotic as the weird and neurotic mental-health professional she’s counselling right now. As Hannibal has shown in recent episodes, though, anything’s possible and all bets are off. This is one case where the inmates truly are running the asylum. (City, NBC, 10 Et/PT, 11 MT)

Three to See

• Anger-management counselling is probably a good idea on Hell’s Kitchen, but it’s not likely to happen in Thursday’s hour. Chef Gordon Ramsay challenges the remaining contestants to communicate with each other and work in sync during a three entree relay race, in which each team has 30 minutes to prepare three dishes with just one chef in the kitchen at any given time. No extra points for smashed dishes. (City, Fox, 8 ET/PT, 9 MT)

• The Big Bang Theory repeats the Valentine’s Day episode, The Tangible Affection Pool, in which Sheldon (Jim Parsons) scours high and low for the perfect gift for Amy, something she’ll appreciate but that won’t annoy him to no end. Some things in life are impossible, though, like faster-than-light travel or a Canucks-Leafs Stanley Cup win. (CTV, CBS, 8 ET/PT, 9 MT)

• Some cases don’t need a crack therapist or rocket scientist to solve, or so or Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) believes in an Elementary repeat from February. Holmes thinks he’s facing an open-and-shut case when Det. Bell (Jon Michael Hill) is attacked while off-duty, but the game takes an unexpected turn when the presumed assailant is found dead. It turns out the case is not so elementary after all. (Global, CBS, 10 ET/PT, 8 MT)

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile